Offbeat: ‘Buzzing’ beyonce

A newly-discovered horsefly with a prominent golden backside gets named after singer Beyonce.

‘Buzzing’ beyonce

A newly-discovered horsefly with a prominent golden backside has been named after singer Beyonce.

Bryan Lessard, 24, of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, named the insect Scaptia (Plinthina) beyonceae.

He said Beyonce would be “in the nature history books forever” and that the fly now bearing her name is “pretty bootylicious” with its golden backside.

The species had been sitting in a fly collection since it was captured in 1981 — the same year Beyonce was born.

Mr Lessard said he was unable to find any live specimens when he went looking in 2010 in north-east Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands, where it was captured.

However, at least one member of the public has alerted him that he was recently bitten by what’s locally called the “gold bum fly.”

Mr Lessard said he has not heard from Beyonce, but hopes she will take his scientific gesture as a compliment. Source: orange.co.uk

Bridegrooms beware

If you thought the birds were angry watch out for the brides. “Angry Brides” is a video game that aims to highlight the widespread practice of dowry in India.

“The Angry Brides game is our way of throwing a spotlight on the nuisance of dowry,” said Ram Bhamidi, senior vice president and head of online marketing for Shaadi.com, a matrimonial website with two million members.

“According to a 2007 study ... there is a dowry related death every four hours in India. We condemn this menace and have consistently run campaigns on social media to help create awareness of the issue,” he states.

The name of the app is a spinoff from the globally popular “Angry Birds” game. Its home page shows a red-clad, eight-armed woman resembling a powerful female Hindu goddess.

Underneath, there is a caption: “A woman will give you strength, care and all the love you need... NOT dowry!”

To play the game, users have to try and hit three dodging grooms — a pilot, a builder and a doctor.There is a wide array of weapons to choose from, including a stiletto shoe, a frying pan, a broomstick, a tomato and a loafer.

Each groom has a price tag, starting at 1.5 million rupees. Every time the player hits a groom, his value decreases and money is added to the player’s “Anti-Dowry Fund”.

“Since we launched the game last week, more than 270,000 people have liked the app. Both men and women seem to be playing it,” said Bhamidi. Reuters

Big guns come in small boxes

A Russian villager discovered a stockpile of Kalashnikov assault rifles hidden in the wooden crates he bought for $15 from a stranger to use as fuel for his winter stove.

A total of 79 guns and 253 cartridges were stuffed in more than 60 wooden boxes bought by a resident of the village of Sovkhozny in Udmurtia, a region some 1,300 km South-East of Moscow, Interfax news agency reported on Friday.

The 57-year old local resident said he bought them from a random truck driver for 500 roubles ($15.81) to heat his home.

The fully functional rifles, produced in 1959-1960, were on their way to a recycling plant from Izhmash, one of the country’s oldest arms manufacturing plants, the company said, when they wound up in the man’s possession.

Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, appointed last December by President Dmitry Medvedev to oversee the country’s defense industry, said he will launch a probe into the mysterious appearance of automatic rifles.

“Wow! I will hold a meeting with Izhmash about its firearms next week and we will deal with this miracle,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

“I imagine how scared the West is of our nuclear arms,” a Facebook user Oleg Zabara wrote in a comment on Rogozin’s post. “Not because they exist, but because they could accidentally fall on them (by mistake), just like those rifles got to that old man.”

It was not immediately clear if the driver was aware that he was carrying firearms in the boxes he rushed to cash in on, but investigators said a probe will look into the incident. Reuters

A ‘striking’ token for obama

An Iranian non-profit company says it will honor US President Barack Obama’s request that Iran return a drone that crashed there last year.

But instead of the actual drone, the company says it will send miniature toy versions. A lot of them.

“We plan to send a full squadron of 12 to the White House for President Obama as a present,” said Reza Kioumarsi, a spokesman for the Aaye Art Group, a Tehran-based non-profit, non-governmental company that makes novelty items.

The company is trying to determine what Obama’s favorite color is before sending the drones, which are 1/80th the size of the real drone, Kioumarsi said.

In December, Obama said the United States has asked Iran to return the highly classified RQ-170 Sentinel drone.

“We’ve asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said at the time.

Iran has said the country’s armed forces had downed the drone near Kashmar, some 225 kilometres (140 miles) from the border with Afghanistan on December.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech in December that seemed to suggest that Iran wouldn’t return it.

“The North Americans at best have decided to give us this spy plane,” Ahmadinejad said.

The RQ-170 Sentinel is one of the United States’ most sophisticated drones and flies at up to 50,000 feet. It is designed to evade sophisticated air defenses.

One former intelligence official said it’s “impossible to see” and discounted Iranian claims that it had been brought down by some form of electronic counter-measures. “It simply fell into their laps,” he said — after satellite communication was lost.

Source: edition.cnn.com

No Barbies for Iran

Iran’s morality police are cracking down on the sale of Barbie dolls to protect the public from what they see as an attempt by the West to erode Islamic values.

As the West imposes the toughest ever sanctions on Iran and tensions rise over its nuclear program, inside the country the Barbie ban is part of what the government calls a “soft war” against decadent cultural influences.

“About three weeks ago they (the morality police) came to our shop, asking us to remove all the Barbies,” said a shopkeeper in a toy shop in northern Tehran.

Iran’s rulers first declared Barbie, made by U.S. company Mattel Inc, un-Islamic in 1996, citing its “destructive cultural and social consequences.” Despite the ban, the doll has until recently been openly on sale in Tehran shops.

The new order, issued around three weeks ago, forced shopkeepers to hide the doll behind other toys as a way of meeting popular demand for the dolls while avoiding being closed down by the police. A range of officially approved dolls launched in 2002 to counter demand for Barbie have not proven successful, merchants told Reuters.

The dolls named Sara, a female, and Dara, a male arrived in shops wearing a variety of traditional dress, with Sara fully respecting the rule that all women in Iran must obey in public, of covering their hair and wearing loose-fitting clothes.

“My daughter prefers Barbies. She says Sara and Dara are ugly and fat,” said Farnaz, a 38-year-old mother, adding that she could not find Barbie cartoon DVDs as she was told they were also banned from public sale.

Pointing to a doll covered in black long veil, a 40-year-old Tehran toy shop manager said: “We still sell Barbies but secretly and put these in the window to make the police think we are just selling these kinds of dolls.” Reuters

On a record-breaking ‘roll’ 

Massachusetts teens have officially broken the world toilet-paper-folding record. Students from the St Mark’s School in Southborough completed 13 folds and 8,192 layers, beating a previous high school student’s record of 12 folds in 2002. The class was guided by their mathematics teacher James Tanton, who has waited seven years for a class to finally break the record.

According to BostInno.com, the students taped 64 layers of toilet paper into a sixth fold. They then mimicked those layers and folded the stack. The end result was 8,192 layers thick, 1.5 metres wide and 76 centimetres high.

The New Scientist detailed the mathematical process here:

Based on the thickness of a sheet of paper, a formula can be used to calculate the minimum length needed to fold it a given number of times. Paper roughly doubles in size with each fold and the sides become more rounded, making it harder and harder to bend. Wrinkles also have a significant impact, making the formula difficult to follow in practice. In addition, no single roll is long enough to fold thirteen times, requiring the group to tape together numerous rolls of industrial toilet paper 1.2 kilometres long.

And according to Wired.com, with 0.08mm-thick toilet paper, if you could get a long-enough piece, it would be possible to reach the Moon with around 42 toilet paper folds. Source: huffingtonpost.com

Blast from the past

A personal cheque that Abraham Lincoln wrote the day before he was assassinated is among those that were discovered by an Ohio bank.

The Plain Dealer in Cleveland reports that 70 cheques were found in a vault at Huntington Bank’s Columbus headquarters, including cheques signed by George Washington, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Thomas Edison. Some are being displayed at branches throughout the state. The Lincoln cheques had been made out to “self” for $800.

The cheques had been stored in a vault since at least 1983, when Huntington took over another bank. An employee had begun looking through old boxes last year, which led to the discovery of the cheques. Source: huffingtonpost.com

Richie-Rich

An Indian high school teacher, with a monthly salary of around $700, was astounded when a routine online check of his bank account showed a balance of almost $10 billion. Parijat Saha, from the town of Balurghat in West Bengal state, said he had checked his State Bank of India account online last Sunday to confirm reception of a 10,000 rupee ($200) interest payment.

“Instead I saw this astronomical amount,” he told.

The account showed a balance of 496 billion rupees.

After recovering from the initial shock at becoming an overnight billionaire — at least on paper — Saha, 42, said he immediately called a friend he knew at the bank to point out what was obviously a major accounting error.

The State Bank of India said it was not immediately clear how the amount came to be registered in Saha’s account.

“We are trying to ascertain what went wrong,” said local branch manager Subhashish Karmakar.

“We have informed our regional headquarters in Kolkata and national headquarters in Mumbai,” he said. AFP

Burgers for the blind

The Wimpy burger chain in South African has recently launched a new ad campaign. The company’s locations all apparently feature menus in Braille for the benefit of the visually impaired. To advertise that fact, Wimpy decided to launch a viral marketing campaign that would appeal to blind people.

The company had its chefs painstakingly adorn 15 burger buns with sesame seeds spelling out various messages in Braille. (For example: “100% Pure Beef Burger Made For You.”) Wimpy then brought burgers using those buns to three institutions for the visually impaired around South Africa and gave the burgers to 15 blind people. The company filmed these peoples’ reactions and made a commercial out of it. Source: huffingtonpost.com

A royal apparition

Paranormal investigators are studying a video said to show a ghostly-looking figure resembling Princess Diana in a stained glass window.

The video was shot in a Glasgow church by Chinese tourists who did not notice the Diana image until they played their holiday video back when they got home.

A writer who often writes on paranormal activity, Michael Cohen, who was sent the video, said it was one of the “clearest” paranormal images he had come across.

He said: “The footage is currently being examined by myself and other researchers to ascertain if it is a genuine ghost capture. It might be a bizarre optical illusion, but then again, it could be a ghost — possibly Princess Diana’s. Ghosts often appear in places connected to their lives and families. Ghosts might appear to warn individuals, groups and even entire nations of possible impending danger.” The footage is being used in an upcoming TV series on paranormal mysteries. Source: orange.co.uk

Published in The Express Tribune, January 21^st, 2012.